In warehouses and factories, manipulation of an article using a robot (grasping, attaching, welding, or the like of the article) can be realized by teaching operation procedures to the robot in advance. The teaching is a work for causing an operator to store all of the operation procedures for manipulating a target article in the robot with the use of a controller or the like. However, in order to operate the robot according to the teaching, an assumption that a state of a manipulation target such as a shape or a posture is identical with that during teaching is required.
On the contrary, there is a method using a device that measures a shape of a surrounding environment of a stereo camera, a 3D sensor, or the like. With the use of the shape measurement device, it is possible to measure a distance to a surrounding entity, measure a three-dimensional shape of the entity, and recognize a shape, a position, and a posture of the target article. With the recognition of the environment and the operation of the robot on the basis of a situation, the target article can be manipulated even if an environmental situation is changed to some change. As an example using the shape measurement device, there is an operating method disclosed in PTL 1. In the above operating method, the target article is detected from the shape of the surrounding environment obtained by the measurement, and the detected posture of each article is recognized. The grasping operation is performed according to the recognized posture, thereby being capable of flexibly grasping the article even if the posture of each article is different.